RD4AG--- Research Designed for Agriculture

Monday, November 20, 2017

We do our share of drought work. Yuma Arizona is drier than most of the Sahara
Desert—we receive only 2.8 inches (75mm) of precipitation a year! When combined with our two growing seasons
for most crops, this region lends itself to this kind of work. But all not drought programs are created
equal. Giving some thought to what the type
of drought situation you want to simulate is paramount to determining the right
approach.

Drought means that the plant is in moisture stress for a
period of time. That period can be
anything for a couple of hours on a hot afternoon to being severely water
deficient for most of the plants life.

The cause or reason for the drought is also pertinent.

·A situation where there is rationing of water,
and now a grower is forced to grow his crops on 10, 20 or 50% less water than
“normal”.

·Perhaps the situation is that the water is only
available on a schedule, and the grower gets it every 7, 14 or? Days regardless
of the plants need.

·It could be a dry land situation, and the rains
do not come for 3 weeks when the plants need it most.

How to administer the drought becomes critical. Typically, we like to use drip irrigation as
we can assure uniformity, and we can regulate and confine it accurately. Surface water can be utilized in some
situations. Sprinklers can also be used,
but again, only in some situations.

The generic program we see requests a percentage reduction
in water applied. Reductions of 25 and 50%
are common requests. So, getting to the
first discussion above… What is the “normal 100%” amount of available
moisture? We have worked with some very high-tech
software to predict moisture needs using soils, crop growth stages and forecast
temperatures. To date we have watched
them all FAIL miserably. Corn in a full
“pineapple roll” at 9 am when it should be fine for several more days. And we have followed conventional wisdom on
irrigation and cut back 20% only to have no effect on yield at all. All this means is that drought work is as
much art as it is science.

When do we want drought stress? Do we want to get the crop
out of the ground and then reduce it?
Most places with wet or snowy winters and then spring plantings come out
of the winter wet. This means that the
crop comes up in moisture, and the suffering is later. Many in the corn belt feel it is V-8 before
they can dry things down significantly.
This is the most common scenario, and based on our experience, much
drought stress at germination is next to impossible to overcome and have a
normal yield.

Do we want to grow the crop with just enough water and then at
fruit set, or tasseling, etc, we want to stress for a month as if the rains did
not come or the reservoir went dry? To
do this effectively we need to keep the lower soil horizons water quantity as
dry as possible so when we induce the stress, the roots don't make up the
deficit by getting the water from the lower depths. (The same concept holds
true for nutrient deficiency trials.) In
our experience, a full flood irrigation will fill those lower profiles and deep-rooted
crops like corn or tomatoes will take 30-60 days to show much stress. But this strategy can backfire. In summer of 2017 here in Yuma, we were
keeping our tomatoes and watermelons on the light side of wet, with not much at
all for available moisture in the second foot of soil. June 20, the first day of summer we had 120 Fahrenheit.
—the 4th hottest day on record, and abnormally early. We were caught flat footed and the crops went
down in a hurry without having a reserve of deep water to pull from.

Whatever scenario is targeted, a decision has to be made
about frequency of the water. Are we
putting on a little bit every day or three with “normal” being an acre inch and
the reduced regimes ¾”? Or are we
watering every other day with the normal amount one day and a reduced quantity
every other irrigation? Another
possibility is to water Several acre inches every 10-14 days like we would with
a surface irrigation, and then withhold water Longer on the dry section. Part of this decision is if we are mimicking
a situation of water rationing, or if we are looking at a dryland scenario of
no rain for a few weeks.

When in a water rationing situation, most growers will water
it out of the ground well, and then irrigate for a good fruit set and try to
cut back some during the bulking stage.
But so much depends on the crop.
Shorting tomatoes or peppers during the fruit bulking growth stage will
typically cause blossom end rot, even if there is enough water to make most of
the tonnage.

This discussion can be endless! Determining the situation you want to mimic
is the starting point. The more we
understand what the product might do, combined with lots of discussion about what
might and might not work is the foundation of a good trial.

Sunday, January 11, 2015

We have been doing strawberry work off and on for the past few years. The low Desert of CA/AZ has been producing December-March fruit for 10 years or so, and there are around a thousand acres down here each year. The majority of the plantings are in the Coachella Valley, closer to Palm Springs, with the rest scattered around. For the past few years we have planted a small acreage here in Yuma of commercial style Strawberries--raised beds with plastic and drip irrigated, with a first of October planting of a commercial variety. Steve Lucich with Norcal Nursery in Red Bluff, California has been a great help to our efforts, and we sincerely appreciate his and the rest of the staff at Norcal Nursery's support. Ron Sakuma, one of the original brothers who formed Norcal actually worked with us 25 years ago when we played with Strawberries in Colorado, but that is another story...

For pest issues we have the usual Botrytis fruit rots, and more interestingly, we typically have a significant amount of Anthracnose as a flower / fruit issue. To the point where we won't harvest much if we do not control it. Powdery mildew is sporadic here.

Two Spotted Mites (Image by J. Bundy)

We also have our fair share of issues with two spotted mites. Last year they surprised us and were a real issue in our trials--except of course in our mite trials, where they were welcome!! The planting we have in this winter has a low level of pressure as the weather is cool, and we are nurturing them so that when the weather warms back up in a month or so, we will have a thriving population where we can do trials without the concern of either a) over spray from the commercial grower, or b) complaints from the commercial grower about how we are bombing his field with mites parachuting in...

Iron is an issue in Desert Strawberries

You can also see in the image at the right that Iron can be an issue in our soils, and strawberries are the proverbial Canary ... we do a reasonable amount of fertility work since at 15 or 20 thousand dollars an acre for commercial fields, getting the growers to shut down their fertilizer program is challenging. Same is true with transplant issues such as Phytophthora. We have the option to keep the fumigation off the blocks, and the mortality from damping off problems is somewhat frightening in the non-fumigated areas.

The one on the right does not look too happy--
root diseases strike again! The one on the left has
worm damage and the center of the flower is frosted

Phytophthora--Killer of Youth...

One of the more interesting things about strawberries is that there is a limit on how many people want... at the beginning of harvest (December), our staff are arm wrestling to see who gets to take them home... and by March, everyone looks the other way when they walk past the boxes...

Whatever your testing needs are for Strawberries, let us know and we will work with you on a method!

Saturday, November 8, 2014

Planting more plots, this time in the Yuma area... in the Winter Wheat Planting in Montana post from last month, we were working at some points, only 50 miles from the Canadian border... here in this series, we are only 5 miles from the Mexican Border...

We are using a PlotSpider, a self propelled planter / tool bar system set up to plant trays of seeds rather than envelopes as we usually do. This is a fairly specialized piece of equipment, and this is an older model we are resurrecting in cooperation with Dr. Oly Cantu at Arizona Plant Breeders.

The system and machine worked fine. Oh there were the usual new equipment blues like forgetting to put the drills in the ground, but overall, it worked great. And hopefully our alleys will be straight!!!

Calibrating to plant 4 foot plots

Kenny watching the cone and trip marks as we calibrate.

Kenny working to keep the rows straight while Cody runs the
tray planter in some 25 foot Canola plots

Canola seed in the cone

Daniel driving as Brandy runs the trays and Cody calls the trip points
in some 8 foot long wheat plots

Saturday, August 23, 2014

Auto-steer has been around for a while in the more expensive
tractors. I remember the first time I
saw someone making vegetable beds with a GPS system and auto-steer—WOW!! Traditionally, a farm would have one guy—a Prima
Donna usually—who was the Lister Driver (a lister is the shovel implement which
makes beds)... and this guy was revered for being able to drive straight and
with consistent guess rows.

Guess Rows are the bane in row crops… a guess row is the space
between implement passes… Let’s say you have an 8 row Lister, which means it
has 9 identically shaped shovels spaced EXACTLY the same distance apart, and at
exactly the same depth mounted on a perfectly level tool bar. So those 8 rows are all the same. Same height, and of course, all the same
distance from peak of the row to the peak of the adjacent rows. In our case with vegetables, that peak to
peak distance is 42.0 inches.

So you make a pass and you have 8 beautiful beds…you get to the
other end of the field and then you get ready to drive back. In the old days we used a marker. The marker was a shank with a small shovel of
some flavor which was set so that it was in the middle of the next pass with
the tractor. The idea being that you
would drive over that line and everything would be straight and even. And this is where the “Lister Driver”
excelled… he could drive that line straight as an arrow, and be only an inch or
two off. And he was king. Everything else hinged on his straight
rows. The cultivating, the spraying,
harvesting all went much better when the rows were straight and even.

So our mystical Lister Driver would make his turn and then get
lined up on the mark… usually requiring a couple of backups and pull forwards
to get this 28 foot implement mounted on a 300 horse tractor exactly right. The advent of GPS accuracy, brought about after President Clinton, (during lulls between sessions with Monica) signed the bill which removed the
distortion from the navigation satellites and allows sub-inch precision with the right receivers.So now most anyone can drive a lister, do a
better job and be quicker.Why? Because when
you make your turns, you don’t have to line up adjacent to the previous pass,
you can make a broader and easier turn, kick on the auto-steer when you are
close and the machine takes over and puts you right where you want to be.

4 Little Devils Farming's 28 foot Lister completing
a pass in an RD4AG field soon to be in Lettuce. Take a
tape, every bed is 42.0 inches apart

Back when, the suggestion that you could list 28 feet, move over
112 feet, and have that pass end up being in the right spot, and I mean DEAD
ON, was the dream at beer bashes and whiskey parties. And today, most anyone can do it. But these systems work best at 3 mph plus and they are a 30-50
thousand dollar add on to the hydraulic systems on to a new or used
tractor.And they don’t really put them
on small tractors like we use in research. A few years back Trimble decided to
appease the Tulip growers in Holland, designing a system which would be
accurate at the 2 kph (1.2 mph) speed they used when transplanting.

But those are still expensive ad ons—to do the plumbing into your
existing tractors hydraulics was pushing 20 grand, plus another 10 for the GPS
system. For most of us, that would more
than double the tractor value! We have
been working with our friends at Triangle Ag in Fort Benton, Montana on this
for a while. DeImna worked in
research while getting her degree at University of Idaho, so she was sympathetic to
our issues, and she made the error of not hanging up on me the first time I
called…

With her help, we found a good used Trimble FMX GPS machine and
then we bought the components to put Trimble’s gear based steering wheel auto steer
system. It still cost us 10 grand but we felt like this was a bargain for technology we needed as the precision required of us gets tighter and tighter each season. We have been playing with this
for the past couple months, and we are finally getting it dialed into where we
want. The first tries found the machine
not sure which line it should be taking… we are doing passes of 5 or 6 or 7
feet at 1.5 mph when planting, and that takes different settings than 28 feet
at 5mph… but as you can see from the photos from yesterday’s corn planting, we
are getting the hang of it. Our guess
rows are 41-42-43 inches, on a nominal 42, so things are good. And this makes such a huge improvement in the
other tasks later…

Straight rows... Magical! The angled dirt ridge is from a previous operation.
Those are Medjool Date palms in the back ground.

Saturday, April 26, 2014

The month of April has been a busy one.... We wrapped up all of our lettuce work... we had about 15 acres of various lettuces in plots this past season... and that is a BUNCH (ha ha) of lettuce! The disease pressure this spring for Downy Mildew was as heavy as we have ever seen it... and the Powdery was plentiful as well... but we won't bore you with pictures of diseased plants...
We have a fairly large program in Montana this year, and while travelling up with the cone drill, we spotted this guy outside of Bozeman. No, we did not stop to pick him up. (thanks to Mike Beevers of Cal Ag Research for pointing this fellow out to us).

Once we arrived in Montana, this is what our plots looked like... this is at the Eddies corner trial site, but the others in Malta and Sun River looked about the same. We did not see any differences among any of our variety nor fertilizer nor seed treatment trials in regards to the amount of snow cover on the plots.

Meanwhile back in Yuma we were hitting 90 degree weather, even kissing 100 a couple of days... You would think that this would push the wheat along, but it did not... by the 10th or so we were able to get in and start slowly... things were PLENTY wet... most of the early samples had to be left out to air dry. Despite the way it may look here, Isaiah is NOT trying to dry out the plot with a leaf blower.... but there were times when it seemed like a good idea....

Besides moisture, we also had bird issues at one of our farms, so we dragged out our bird netting and put it up over the the trial in the way of the flock... it is much more enjoyable to shoot the damn things, but one can only have so much fun... Putting up this kind of netting works well, and there is a certain amount of pleasure to be had watching the red-winged blackbirds frantically trying to get through the nets... if you decide you would like to make a blackbird pie, let us know and we will go get 4 and twenty for you...

This year we took on a larger project with involved several one hectare breeder seed plots. Since the seed was due for export to Canada, we needed to clean it as well, which for the small cleaners normally found at a facility such as ours, cleaning 70,000 pounds of seed requires some new thinking. While in Montana dropping off equipment, I stumbled across an older Clipper Super 49BD thanks to the great assistance of our friend Ernest Bergsagel. Ernest tracked down some motors and had some augers made, and the set up is as you can see at the right...

But getting this beast out of the snow and onto a trailer proved challenging... it weighs 3000 pounds or so... as I was leaving Montana, I pulled into one cooperating Farmers yard, and Paul asks "You been robbing the Smithsonian?" I felt redeemed when I got to Great Falls and another Farmer, Chuck says "A 49! We have a 57 we use all the time (the 57 is the next bigger size).

This machine will handle better than 100 bu an hour, but not with us running it at the moment. It does a decent job, and once we get it fully setup, it will be excellent. Interestingly, this series was manufactured from 1938 to 1967. Ours was made in 1950. The parts guy at AT Ferrell, told me that he sells $120,000 dollars a month in parts for these "old" cleaners, shipping them all over the world. All of the pieces I asked him about he had in stock... The Clipper brand, and AT Ferrell have always been well respected, and I can see why... we have one of their desktop cleaners.. it will handle about 30 pounds an hour (and it cost us $2,300 new 10 years ago), but it has always been a good machine.But we still need to get the crop off, so we fitted Aiavata (our name for our bigger combine) with a pickup header and had the fields wind-rowed commercially, rigged up a transport system with Supersacks and stared to it... Not fast compared to the big machines of today, but it does Okay. The tank holds 3600 pounds or so of wheat, so we are able to get most of an acre with this early terminated and shortchanged wheat---which is intentional since we are trying to get it harvested early and shipped for seeding in the Northern part of the continent... the trade off is yield, and I should add, ease of harvest and cleaning.